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Trump allegedly mocked Sidney Powell during a phone call

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 04:15:38 +0000

Left: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, in June 2024 (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: FILE – Sidney Powell, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves the federal court in Washington, June 24, 2021 (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File).

Special counsel Jack Smith’s arguments against Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case were published, to a large degree, on the public docket by the court overseeing the matter in a “voluminous” and “oversized” opening brief on Wednesday.

The filing contains a litany of new, never-before-revealed information about the behavior of the 45th president – and those in his orbit – in the days, weeks, and months following his 2020 election loss.

While the government alleges Trump and several co-conspirators spread “knowingly false claims of election fraud,” there were apparently some claims about the integrity of the election so outlandish that even Trump himself privately expressed doubts.

In one instance, those rebuffed-by-Trump claims were made during a press conference by pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, according to the brief. Later, when speaking with others about the allegations Powell released into the public sphere, Trump ridiculed them.

On Nov. 19, 2020, Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and others presented a “Legal Challenges Update” during a flag-draped press conference in Washington, D.C., outlining several purported “paths to victory.” Those paths were premised on various kinds of litigation aimed at overturning the results in several swing states where President Joe Biden narrowly, but decisively, defeated Trump.

Giuliani was first at the dais – where he largely spread false claims about election-rigging efforts in Philadelphia and Wisconsin.

Then it was Powell’s turn.

“What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” she said. “The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software, and the software that goes into other computerized voting systems here, as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out.”

Later that same night, Trump watched then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson criticize Powell, who likened her legal arguments to an unleashed Kraken, for her unwillingness to back up those claims, the brief alleges. After her widely-pilloried comments about the late Venezuelan president’s alleged connection to voting machine manufacturers, Carlson’s team invited her to appear on the show.

“We would have given her the whole hour,” the then-host said. “We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed at the press conference.”

Later on, Trump and another person were discussing Powell’s performance during the press conference – and Carlson’s understanding of how Powell’s allegations fared.

“He acknowledged to [redacted] that [Powell] had appeared ‘unhinged’ in the press conference,” the brief reads.

The insults continued.

“On November 20, the day after the press conference, the defendant made a similar comment to [redacted] and [redacted] two White House staffers who also volunteered for his Campaign,” the brief goes on. “In casual conversation after another meeting had ended, the defendant told [the first staffer] and [the second staffer] that [Carlson] had ‘eviscerated’ or ‘destroyed’ [Powell].”

After that, Trump got onto a phone call with Powell directly, according to the brief. During the call, Trump mentioned the Fox News segment and gave Powell a chance to explain herself – putting the conversation on speakerphone so both staffers could listen along.

“While [Powell] responded, the defendant placed the call on mute and to [the first staffer] and [the second staffer] mocked and laughed at [Powell], called her claims ‘crazy,’ and made a reference to the science fiction series Star Trek when describing her allegations,” the brief says.

But it was not just Trump and Carlson who made their issues with Powell’s unsupported theories known.

Smith alleges that during “the same time period,” yet another trusted person “told” Trump that Powell’s “claims were unreliable and should not be included in lawsuits,” In response, Trump allegedly “agreed that he had not seen anything to substantiate [Powell’s] allegations.”

On Nov. 22, 2020, Giuliani issued a statement distancing the Trump campaign from Powell – insisting she was “practicing law on her own.”

Still, Powell managed to obtain the Trump imprimatur.

“Nonetheless, the defendant continued to support and publicize [Powell’s] knowingly false claims,” the brief goes on.

In the days that followed, Trump personally sent two tweets promoting Powell’s failed lawsuit alleging electoral fraud in Georgia.

And that, Smith says, is of a piece with the fundamental artifice of the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

“The throughline of these efforts was deceit,” Smith’s brief reads.

And those efforts – derided by Smith as “lies” – were known to be lies by Trump and his co-conspirators, the brief alleges.

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort,” Smith’s brief goes on. “In his capacity as a candidate, the defendant used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”

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Supreme Court denies case of pro-Trump ‘Kraken’ lawyers

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:40:15 +0000

FILE – Sidney Powell, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, leaves the federal court in Washington, June 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal filed by a group of attorneys who were sanctioned for their work to keep Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election.

In an order list, the nation’s high court denied certiorari to Sidney Powell, as well as fellow lawyers Brandon Johnson, Howard Kleinhendler, Julia Haller, Gregory Rohl, and Scott Hagerstrom.

Each of the so-called “Kraken” attorneys — an umbrella term used by Powell herself which references a phrase from the 1981 Desmond Davis-Ray Harryhausen film “Clash of the Titans” — were sanctioned after filing a lawsuit on behalf of three Republican Party county chairs and three would-be false electors in Michigan.

The lawsuit filed by the pro-Trump attorneys contained unproven claims of election fraud and sought to decertify the results in the Wolverine State — weeks after voting occurred. Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker found those claims meritless and unlikely to succeed in any court — describing the allegations as lacking legally-acceptable evidence. The judge characterized the legal arguments as “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation.”

The court also determined the lawsuit was filed much too late anyway.

The City of Detroit joined in the litigation as a permissive intervenor and moved for sanctions, including bar referral, against the attorneys for filing the lawsuits. Michigan, in turn, requested sanctions as well.

After the sanctions motions hearing, the district court ordered the “Kraken” group to pay $21,964.75 to Michigan and $153,285.62 to Detroit — and referred each of the attorneys for professional misconduct investigations to their respective legal licensing boards — in order to deter future such lawsuits “designed primarily to spread the narrative that our election processes are rigged.”

As officers of the court, lawyers are, to a certain degree, responsible for their clients and owe duties to the judiciary, the public, and the legal profession. And, by filing the lawsuit over false fraud allegations, the “Kraken” lawyers did not meet those expectations, Parker ruled.

“The sanctity of both the courtroom and the litigation process are preserved only when attorneys adhere to this oath and follow the rules, and only when courts impose sanctions when attorneys do not,” the judge wrote in her 110-page opinion and order. “And despite the haze of confusion, commotion, and chaos counsel intentionally attempted to create by filing this lawsuit, one thing is perfectly clear: Plaintiffs’ attorneys have scorned their oath, flouted the rules, and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way.”

In September 2022, the “Kraken” attorneys appealed their sanctions before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

On appeal, the Sixth Circuit panel found “the district court awarded fees for a number of tasks that bore little connection to sanctionable conduct” and reduced the sanctions awards for Michigan and Detroit to $19,639.75 and $132,810.62, respectively.

The full circuit declined to rehear en banc and the mandate was stayed pending whether the nine justices would consider the case.

They did not. This, Powell said, was a disappointment — likening the failed Michigan sanctions-avoiding efforts to more successful efforts in Wisconsin. On Tuesday, the nation’s high court rejected an appeal of a sanctions denial order issued by the 7th Circuit.

“We appreciate the Court’s rejection of Governor Evers continued efforts to sanction us in Wisconsin, but we are very disappointed the Supreme Court is not taking the King case to resolve multiple circuit splits in the application of Rule 11 which affects every lawyer in the country,” Powell told Law&Crime in an email.

“The Court is allowing a dangerous precedent to stand that puts at risk every lawyer who represents an unpopular cause or client,” her statement went on. “It will make it more difficult for individuals to obtain representation, and it is causing a pervasive ‘chilling’ effect on our First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. At bottom, it will make it far more difficult primarily for conservatives to find legal counsel for any fight — but especially an election challenge. And sadly, that is exactly what the Left wants. They don’t want lawyers to be able to fight for you — if you disagree with them. It is a sad day for what remains of the Rule of Law.”

Representatives from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office and the city of Detroit did not immediately respond to Law&Crime’s request for comment.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday also declined to hear an appeal by lawyer L. Lin Wood — who is no longer a practicing attorney — in a separate but related case over the same underlying issue over the Detroit sanctions. Wood gave up his law license in the summer of 2023 in exchange for the Georgia State Bar dropping disciplinary charges against him. The two cases over the Michigan sanctions would have likely been consolidated and were grouped together by a series of open parenthetical marks by the Supreme Court.

A snippet of an orders list from the U.S. Supreme Court in which two cases might have been consolidated had the petitions not been denied.

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